Photograph by: Tracy Bennett

There’s good news and there’s bad news at the cineplex these days.

The good news is that charming movies like Despicable Me 2 continue to blow away the competition, pulling in huge profits as the dog days of summer draw families into cool movie theatres for some minion magic.

The bad news is that another recent sequel, Grown Ups 2, is also going gangbusters at the box office, as Adam Sandler and his insidious oeuvre of juvenile slapstick continue the erosion of Hollywood’s once vaunted cinematic pride.

And therein lies the problem at the core of Hollywood.

If it’s not another animated blockbuster burning up the charts, it’s yet another banal, groan-inducing frat boy comedy or apocalyptic zombie romp.

Where, one asks, are the movies for grown-ups, for filmgoers who like a smart racy comedy or cinematically beautiful drama or a well-told tale of intrigue? Where are the stories that are less about blowing up the globe and being able to sneeze and fart at the same time, and more about great dialogue, excellent adventures and relatable relationships?

For every Away From Her or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, for every Quartet or About Schmidt, for every Cocoon or Amour, there are dozens more cash-grabbing superhero movies and big-budget sequels with blood lust villains and crash-and-burn plots contributing to a movie vault that is overflowing with bad actors, lousy scripts and juvenile sensibilities that are increasingly off-putting for grown-up movie fans.

The irony, of course, is that many of the zombie-fests pull in big money, which means Hollywood is loath to change its formula. Ben Affleck’s Argo may have earned a Best Picture Oscar and $230 million worldwide but it will never enjoy the box office receipts of a movie like Ted, which pulled in twice that amount.

U.S. filmmaker, author and movie fan James Twyman says it’s time to call Hollywood to task on that anomaly.

He says that if you’re a baby boomer and still enjoy going out to the movies, as opposed to renting DVDs or Netflixing, Hollywood is deliberately choosing not to make films that appeal directly to your demographic.

He calls the trend economically foolhardy, given that seniors are increasingly the largest subset of the North American population and given that seniors have more time and disposable income to indulge a few hours a week in front of the big screen. Statistics also show that seniors like going to the movies but, more and more, are getting turned off by the avalanche of crudeness, violence, overdone special effects and, spare us please, Bruce Willis yippee-ki-yaying.

So Twyman wants to send a wake-up call to Hollywood, and to that end he has launched an online petition called One Million Senior Voices, with a plea to boomer moviegoers to voice their opinions and send a clear message to big screen decision-makers: Make more compelling, more intelligent, more uplifting and more smartly entertaining movies that appeal to the most underserved movie fan of all: those over the age of 50.

Twyman has an ulterior motive, mind you. He has an independent movie ready for distribution next spring but when he pitched it to Hollywood producers, he was struck by their insistence that to get his low-budget film any attention in the big leagues “what it’s going to take is a million signatures.”

His film is called Redwood Highway, and stars Oscar-nominated Shirley Knight, with her lovely lined face and thickening frame, and veteran actor Tom Skerritt, a 79-year-old who is also weathering well. It’s about a 75-year-old Oregon woman who is estranged from her family and decides to wrest free of her comfortable but stifling retirement community. She puts on a backpack and takes to the historic Redwood Highway on foot, camping and fishing and meeting a colourful cast of characters on her 80-mile trek to the Pacific Ocean, which she hasn’t seen in 45 years. It is, in effect, a senior coming-of-age tale.

And it is just the kind of movie millions of us say we want to see, reflecting the stages in our lives where our priorities change, where we care less about what others think of us than what we think of them, and where we can feel mortality calling our name, and need to get on with that which is left to do.

Twyman, who is 51 and on the phone this week from his home in Oregon, suggests that Hollywood doesn’t have to choose “either, or” when it comes to making movies, and that clearly the CGI blockbusters and the quieter, more story-centric films can attract complementary audiences.

“We want stories that resonate with our lives . . and that entertain us. We were around for the great era of Hollywood, and we want the experience of going to a movie theatre. We see movies because they teach us something ... whether it’s the Wizard of Oz or Star Wars.”

He notes that Hollywood wunderkind Steven Spielberg said in a speech last month that the Hollywood system is in danger of imploding if it continues to produce movies that cost hundreds of millions and flop at the box office (the $225-million The Lone Ranger comes to mind), adding that if he wasn’t Spielberg his Oscar-winning Lincoln would not have been made it to the big screen.

Even at that, says, Twyman, “Hollywood doesn’t believe it. The Europeans do, but Hollywood doesn’t. The average film today is made for 15-year-olds. It’s the dumbing down of the audience.”

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